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Centre College Deploys AT&T Cloud for Vice Presidential Debate

By Mandira Srivastava, TMCnet Contributor

It will be easy and interesting to see the debate on economic recovery, financial reform, unemployment, taxes, China and other vital issues when Danville, K.Y.-based Centre College is ready to host the vice presidential debate on Oct. 11. The college is to undoubtedly receive a huge amount of attention and resulting higher online traffic, and for this purpose is using AT&T (News - Alert) Synaptic Compute as a Service to host its website, giving the College simple, easy access to scalable cloud computing capacity to handle these spikes in demand.

Additionally, AT&T is also installing a Cell on Wheels (COW) and IP connectivity to keep visiting media, students and debate attendees highly and seamlessly connected on the day of the event.

Centre College is the smallest college to ever host an event of this kind. The college previously hosted the vice presidential debate in 2000, and expects its website to receive more than three million unique visitors during this year's highly anticipated debate.

"These days, people are so connected via the Internet, social networks, news feeds – you name it – that we expect this debate to spark conversation across the nation and throughout the world, not just at Centre College," said Michael Strysick, director of Communications at Centre College, in a statement. "We know that our website is our front door. If we didn't have a stable website to handle the anticipated traffic, we would be in trouble. It's critical to make sure it stays available, even with increased web traffic, which is why we're using AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service as our solution."

AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service will enable the college to read capability required to anticipate increased traffic and allocate resources as needed in a cloud-based environment.

"The ability to make changes in real time to our website was an invaluable feature for us," said Strysick.